Business As Usual

This article, like yesterday’s, is written on a computer running ‘Jaunty Jackalope’, the latest Ubuntu release.

So I wondered, how much would the Irish government save switching to open source.

Probably nothing.

First off, they’d hire an accountancy firm to do some consultancy. Then they’d tweak their requirements and hire a second crew of consultants to check the new specs. Then they’d advertise for tenders, and hire sysadmins at inflated rates.

Unions would demand compensation for working new systems, since everyone would have to be retrained (File|Save in Openoffice is completely different to File|Save in MS Office, you see).

FAS executives would head to Disney NASA to see how they do things over there. PR consultants would be contracted to hire half a dozen dolly birds to pose with the minister in a cringe-worthy photo-op.

Once all that is in place, an incoherent political argument using phrases like security redundancy, backup procedures, and data safety protocol would be used to justify buying Windows systems anyway ‘just in case’ and so as not to piss off Microsoft.

And finally, when it wrong and it’s a Fianna Fáil minister’s fault, Eamonn Ryan will appear on every news show in town to take credit.